Digital Thoughts and Opinions

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I’m a huge fan of retargeting as a digital advertising method. Effectively it combines awareness with intent and can lead to direct ROI. If you’re not familiar with retargeting, effectively it enables advertisers it “follow” you around the web once you have shown your interest.

For example if you click on a Car advert and go to the site, conversion tracking can tell if you have converted (filled in a form, download a PDF etc etc) If you haven’t converted, the site assumes you are interested, drops a cookie on your machine and serves you relevant ads as you browse other sites, in a hope to get you back to the site to convert.

It has an element of hard sell, but can be very effective to change people’s minds and drive conversion.

Anyway, a new company called Drawbridge have figured out a way to do cross device retargeting i.e. from web to mobile. For example, if you browse the web looking for a flight and then leave home and carry on searching on your mobile device, their technology will follow you and serve you relevant ads from device to device. Sure there may be some drawbacks (privacy, making people annoyed etc) but the benefits to advertisers are huge as consumers are constantly shifting and becoming device agnostic.

This will also ensure that more sites become mobile focused, as well as help marketers understand behaviour better i.e. do people purchase more of X on their phone or via the web?